Isabel Lima uses her personal family’s history of displacement prompted by Portugal’s forced de-colonization of Africa in the 70s, as a motivation to investigate identity, otherness, cross-cultural exchanges and place. The artist develops socially engaged artworks, which depend on the collaboration or participation of groups of people. The outcomes usually take the form of film/video, performance, publication and/or installation.

Lima’s interests lie in probing the contradiction between the theoretical framework of postcolonialism and the structures governing our society. Although this theoretical framework claims to highlight and empower the previously unheard or ignored voices of ‘the other’, these voices are still controlled and consigned to hermetic (mediated and vetted) enclosures.

Through the appropriation of historical material and the conception of new representations, Lima’s research aims to explore the legacies of pivotal historical events within contemporary society, where identity, cultures and customs need to be negotiated daily. The artist’s work exists within the contradictions of society’s modus operandi. Similar to the dynamics of cross-cultural exchange in our own society, the inequalities, imbalances of power, and subjugation are not explicitly visible. They need to be found underneath a surface of apparent agreement, calm and placidity, but which in fact hides the politics of control and dissent.